In the State of California, 600 plastic bags are thrown away every second.

Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups according to the nonprofit Center for Marine Conservation.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion)

Some estimate a plastic bag may take one thousand years to decompose. That means a bag thrown away during the crusades, the birth of Constantine, or at the signing of the Magna Carta would just be finishing its decomposition now.

86% of all known species of sea turtles have had reported problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.

If Californians cut their plastic bag waste in half, it would save over two thousand barrels of oil a day( over 800,000 barrels a year) and keep 73,000 tons of rubbish out of our landfills.

L.A. County uses approximately 6 billion plastic bags each year, and 48,000 tons end up in landfills.

Only 10 to 15 percent of paper bags and 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.

Paper bags take up more than twice the landfill space than plastic varietals do. Also, their greater weight and volume requires more trucks and gasoline for hauling than plastic.

It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.

Paper bags generate 70% more air pollutants than plastic bags.

It is estimated that between 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags produced worldwide end up as litter. Remember, production numbers are estimated between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year.

In the 1980s it was estimated that plastic rubbish caused the deaths of over 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles a year in the North Pacific alone.

According to the industry publication Modern Plastics, Taiwan consumes 20 billion bags a year - 900 per person.

According to Australia's Department of Environment, Australians consume 6.9 billion plastic bags each year - 326 per person. An estimated 0.7% or 49,600,000 end up as litter each year.

Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.

As part of Clean Up Australia Day, in one day nearly 500,000 plastic bags were collected.

Windblown plastic bags are so prevalent in Africa that a cottage industry has sprung up harvesting bags and using them to weave hats, and even bags. According to the BBC news, one group harvests 30,000 bags per month.